Micro-stars may manage to avoid black-hole fate

COULD the universe be filled with strange stars the size of footballs? Perhaps, if the big bang fireball churned out superdense stars just a few tens of centimetres wide. And contrary to conventional theory, such stars might even form today when ordinary stars explode.

When a massive star runs out of fuel at the end of its life, it collapses and explodes. If a core about 2 or 3 times as massive as the sun remains, it forms a neutron star, a superdense ball of nuclear matter typically 10 kilometres wide. And if the core is heavier, it should collapse into a black hole.

But now Johan Hansson and Fredrik Sandin of Luleå University of Technology in Sweden have suggested a third possibility, based on the properties of hypothetical particles called preons. Some theorists believe preons could be the building blocks of elementary particles such as quarks and electrons. Preons, ...

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